The net is all abuzz today about this angry memo from Bill Gates to a list of Microsoft bigwigs back in 2003. It's a classic: Gates tries to buy some Microsoft software, has a terrible user experience, and lets people know exactly what he thinks.

Funny, but here's a challenge. Assign yourself any random task on your newspaper's website, like trying to sell a car or give away a dog or maybe just find the forums. Take notes. And then write a Gates memo. Bet you can do it, with feeling.

After some behind-the-scenes testing on newspaper content and newspaper blogs, I've added OpenCalais tagging to my blog to see how it does in a live setting. 

OpenCalais is a free service of Thompson Reuters that scans unstructured (text) content and extracts named entities (people, places things), facts, and events. This can be used to support the so-called "semantic Web," leading eventually to smart applications that do our research for us.

With Semantic Journalism: Ideas, French media blogger Nicolas Kayser-Bril begins a series of posts in which he examines tools and ponders the future of semantic technologies applied to journalism. It looks to be well worth following, even if you're skeptical about the ability of machines to "understand" content.

A post from Howard Owens reminds me that a lot of people probably don't know how easy it is to get circulation information about U.S. newspapers. For papers that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, basic numbers and some deeper data is available online in a searchable format.

I had dinner Friday night with Dean Mills and several other folks from the University of Missouri J-School. Not one word was said about the death of print, the crushing debt loads taken on by big publishing companies, or other depressing topics that tend to dominate journalism conversations (and blogs) these days.

It was an upbeat conversation about exciting possibilities, all hope and energy and yes, optimism. Mizzou has all sorts of fascinating projects in the works.

From Wired.com:

Romenesko quickly found himself living a lonely-guy existence. "I was basically stuck in my apartment," he says. “I would find myself at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, still in my bathrobe." This way of life grew from his hunch about the future of social interaction. "The first time I really sampled the internet, in 1989," he says, "I knew this would be a culture-changing force, and I wanted to be part of it."

We should know by now that professional sporting events are not sporting events at all, but rather commercial entertainment masquerading as athletics. Sadly, the same can be said of the Olympics, which have become dominated by commercial interests that dwarf the actual sports.

Here's one example. Staci Kramer points to a Sports Business Journal report that says: